The modern Gandhi

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Mahatma Gandhi is widely recognised as one of
the most original and influential political thinkers and activists of the 20th
century, yet he remains an elusive figure. He never wrote a comprehensive and
systematic political or philosophical work in the mode of Thomas Hobbes or
Hegel, and the pamphlets and books he did write are extremely diverse in topic:
they include criticisms of modern civilisation, the place of religion in human
life, the meaning of non-violence, social and economic programmes and even
health issues. These works are constructed upon a series of concepts (satyagraha [truth force], swaraj [self-rule], sarvodaya [upliftment of all])which Gandhi elaborates into thematic strands.

Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran and
studied at the Sorbonne University, Paris. He is currently professor at the
University of Toronto.
He was previously Rajni Kothari professor of democracy
at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, and head of the
department for contemporary studies at the Cultural Research Bureau, Iran.

Among his twenty books in English, French and Persian are Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (Phoenix, 2000), (as editor) Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity
(Lexington Books, 2004), and India
Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Also by Ramin Jahanbegloo in openDemocracy:
"America's dreaming" (30 August 2004) - an exchange of letters with Richard Rorty,
part of our "Letters to Americans" series

Gandhi spent much of his life and a great deal
of his writing in an effort to comprehend and explain three vital concepts:
freedom, self-rule and nonviolence. These three concepts (which are also values
and principles) are for Gandhi not only "theoretical frameworks" but also
"methods of struggle". They appear in Gandhian philosophy as the pillars of what Gandhi understands by
a "true civilisation", which he counterposes to a "civilisation only in name".

When once asked if non-violent resistance was
a form of "direct action", Gandhi replied: "...It is the only form." He
described it as the "greatest force...more positive than electricity, and more
powerful than even ether." Gandhi believed non-violence could be put into practice at every level of
human experience. This is an indication of its scope in Gandhi's thinking, for
he regarded non-violence as not just a political tactic but as spirituality and
a way of being.

Today, largely due to the work of Mahatma
Gandhi, India has its political independence, and the work of building that
greater freedom which he set in train is continuing by non-violent workers all
around India. His own fifty-year struggle for national independence reached a culmination in August 1947, but he could see that the
national independence of India was really only the first step towards an
ultimate and even greater goal: equality of opportunity for all, to be achieved
through non-violent action (see Ramin Jahanbegloo, India Revisited: Conversations on
Contemporary India [Oxford
University Press, 2007]).

That is the reason why Mahatma Gandhi
represents today not only the collective conscience of India, but also the collective conscience
of all humanity. His urgent relevance is rooted in his theory and practice of
non-violence, but also in the way that throughout his life he defended
political tolerance and religious pluralism. For nothing about this defence is
doctrinaire or a priori; everything
he claims about the importance of individual autonomy and political freedom for
human life is tested by experience.

Gandhi's ideas evolved through experience
towards gradually more mature and sophisticated propositions that found life in
his hearers, readers, and followers. In this sense Gandhi in his own activity
was able to articulate the fundamental changes taking place in
Indian but also modern understanding. Gandhi was a stern defender of the rule
of law, a critic of all forms of political action based on violence and
intolerance, and a fervent advocate of limited government. The resulting
conception of politics was a pioneering one based on the idea of "active citizenship":
that is, on the value and importance of civic engagement and collective
deliberation (see Bidyut Chakrabarty, The Social and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi [Routledge, 2005]).

openDemocracy's articles on India and the legacy of Mahatma
Gandhi include:

Mahatma Gandhi had the courage to stand on his
own ground and talk back to "the authority of the
tradition", consistent in his core beliefs while remaining free enough to
change his mind, discover new things and rediscover what he had once put aside.
What Gandhi was "not" - a religious fundamentalist, a cultural revivalist,
committed to the idea of absolute reason - is as revealing as what he affirmed.
His work is very far from a sort of mental gearbox that drives thought and
action in one direction only, powered by a spiritual engine with a monolithic
ideology as the fuel source. This singular combination of moral and political
principle is also part of Gandhi's contemporaneity.

The seed
and the sower

At the core of Gandhian non-violence is the
effort to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that limit or
block dialogue among human beings and cultures. In this respect, the
contribution of Mahatma in the creation and cultivation of a public
culture of citizenship that guarantees to everyone the right to opinion and
action - not at the convenience of systems of representation based on
bureaucratic parties and state structures - makes his example part of the
unfolding Indian and global present (see Debjani Ganguly &
John Docker, eds., Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global
Perspectives
[Routledge, 2007]).

Gandhi was very conscious of the fact that the
cultivation of an "enlarged pluralism" requires the creation of institutions
and practices where the voice and perspective of everyone can be articulated,
tested and transformed. This indeed is a vision of modernity, offering fruitful
insights that may help us to confront the dilemmas of the new century: among
them how to create a sense of global citizenship, how to turn inter-faith
dialogue into a means of civic and moral self-understanding, and how to realise
the potential of non-violence to heal a torn world. To reap the harvest of
these ideas, we must sow the seeds - and the seeds are in Gandhi. In this
respect, this moral and intellectual figure - sixty years after his death on 30 January 1948 - retains
the disturbing capacity to unsettle fixed categories, shake inherited
conceptual habits, and challenge us to see the world in a fresh light.